Elephant resource-use traditions

African elephants (Loxodonta africana) use unusual and restricted habitats such as swampy clearings, montane outcrops and dry rivers for a variety of social and ecological reasons. Within these habitats, elephants focus on very specific areas for resource exploitation, resulting in deep caves, large forest clearings and sand pits as well as long-established and highly demarcated routes for moving between resources. We review evidence for specific habitat exploitation in elephants and suggest that this represents socially learned cultural behaviour. Although elephants show high fidelity to precise locations over the very long term, these location preferences are explained neither by resource quality nor by accessibility. Acquiring techniques for exploiting specific resource sites requires observing conspecifics and practice and is evidence for social learning. Elephants possess sophisticated cognitive capacities used to track relationships and resources over their long lifespans, and they have an extended period of juvenile dependency as a result of the need to acquire this considerable social and ecological knowledge. Thus, elephant fidelity to particular sites results in traditional behaviour over generations, with the potential to weaken relationships between resource quality and site preferences. Illustrating the evidence for such powerful traditions in a species such as elephants contributes to understanding animal cognition in natural contexts.     

Fit inside the work‐family black box: An ecology of the life course,cycles of control reframing

Scholars have not fully theorized the multifaceted, interdependent dimensions within the work‐family ‘black box’. Taking an ecology of the life course approach, we theorize common work‐family and adequacy constructs as capturing different components of employees' cognitive appraisals of fit between their demands and resources at the interface between home and work. Employees' appraisals of their work‐family linkages and of their relative resource adequacy are not made independently but, rather, co‐occur as identifiable constellations of fit. The life course approach hypothesizes that shifts in objective demands/resources at work and at home over the life course result in employees experiencing cycles of control, that is, corresponding shifts in their cognitive assessments of fit. We further theorize patterned appraisals of fit are key mediators between objective work‐family conditions and employees' health, well‐being and strategic adaptations. As a case example, we examine whether employees' assessments on 10 dimensions cluster together as patterned fit constellations, using data from a middle‐class sample of 753 employees working at Best Buy's corporate headquarters. We find no single linear construct of fit that captures the complexity within the work‐family black box. Instead, respondents experience six distinctive constellations of fit: one optimal; two poor; and three moderate fit constellations.     

Cultural differences in young children's vulnerability to injuries: a risk and protection perspective.

Interview data from 100 lower income Hispanic and 50 White mothers from a nutritional service clinic extended prior research on cultural differences in the risk for unintentional pediatric injuries. Group differences were expected in reported injury incidence and in the prevalence and impact of contributing factors. As predicted, White mothers reported more injuries for a young child, and among Hispanic mothers, English language preference and use were associated with more reported injuries. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that risky behaviors, mother's judgment about child compliance, and stressful life events were better predictors of injuries than housing quality, but among Hispanics, the impact of certain factors (e.g. child temperament) was qualified by mother's acculturation level. Stress and child temperament explained injury differences between more- and less-acculturated Hispanic families but only partially accounted for differences between White mothers and less-acculturated Hispanics. Pediatric injury risk and protective factors seemed to operate in concert with cultural processes.     

Factors Related to Play Therapists' Social Justice Advocacy Attitudes

The authors used a correlational research design to examine how belief in a just world, political ideology, socioeconomic status of family of origin, and percentage of racial minority clients were related to social justice advocacy attitudes among play therapists. A multiple regression was used to analyze the data. Results indicated that belief in a just world and political ideology were related to social justice advocacy. Implications for play therapy training and future directions for research are discussed. Los autores emplearon un diseño correlacional de investigación para examinar cómo la creencia en un mundo justo, la ideología política, el estatus socioeconómico de la familia de origen y el porcentaje de clientes de minorías raciales estaban relacionados con actitudes de apoyo de la justicia social entre consejeros que usan terapia de juego. Se empleó una regresión múltiple para analizar los datos. Los resultados indicaron que la creencia en un mundo justo y la ideología política estaban relacionadas con la defensa de la justicia social. Se discuten las implicaciones para formación en terapia de juego y direcciones futuras para investigación.     

Mastery motivation in boys and girls: The role of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation

This research tested the hypothesis that the importance of adult approval and feedback for females relative to males would render girls of elementary school age more likely to develop an extrinsic orientation in comparison to boys. Using S. Harter's Scale of Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation [(1981), “A New Self-Report Scale of Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivational Orientation in the Classroom: Motivational and Informational Components,” Developmental Psychology Vol. 17, pp. 300–312], the data supported this hypothesis. Because of the assumed differential importance of controlling feedback from adults for females relative to males, a second study examined girls' and boys' preference for challenge as a function of adult controlling feedback and children's motivational orientation. The pattern of data supported the hypothesis that girls relative to boys show differential preferences for challenge, depending on the presence of type of adult feedback and motivational orientation in girls.     

A further examination of project aware: The relationship between teacher behaviors and changes in student behavior

The purpose of the present study was to examine specifically how teacher behaviors influence the effectiveness of a social development program entitled Project AWARE. Thirty-one teachers and two hundred and nine children were included in this study (82 at the primary level and 127 at the intermediate level). Participant teachers were rated in terms of their skill at implementation. For the intermediate grades, those teachers who received the highest skill ratings also tended to report positive changes in their children's behavior over the six months of the study. Those teachers who received the lowest skill ratings tended to report little change in behavior. For the primary grades, similar results were not obtained. Implications of these findings for implementation of classroom programs are discussed.     

Cognitions related to anxiety: a pilot study of treatment

In general, where anxiety appears to have a specific external focus, such as the situations which are avoided by phobic patients, treatment involving systematic exposure to those situations seems to be effective. This is less appropriate, or even impossible, where anxiety is not dependent on any external circumstance, but is described by the patient as occurring at any time or place, either chronically over long periods, or acutely in the form of ‘panic attacks’. These patients with ‘generalised’ anxiety often describe internal cues for anxiety either in the form of thoughts (e.g. worry over a current problem) or somatic (e.g. chest sensations interpreted as possible heart disease). Beck et al. (1974) has suggested that on interview, all patients diagnosed as suffering from diffuse or generalised anxiety can report specific ideas or other cognitive cues which are associated with anxiety. These usually concern possible traumatic events, such as illness and death, or social rejection. Clearly Beck has in mind the possibility that these cognitions have the effect of inducing anxiety, although even if the validity of the subjective reports were to be accepted, the problem remains of whether the relationship between mood state and cognitions is causal and if so, in which direction it operates. Obviously a causal relationship may also operate in both directions simultaneously, to form a ‘vicious circle’ in which each exacerbates the other. To establish whether there is a sense in which particular cognitions contribute causally to anxious mood, it would be necessary to find a method of manipulating the type or frequency of cognitions thought to be operating in this way.

One obvious possibility is that of ‘thought-stopping’: that is, patients could be taught to identify thoughts which are associated with anxiety and stop them in the usual way (Wolpe, 1973, p. 211) e.g. by' shouting stop, and substituting an alternative thought. The present study was planned as a pilot experiment to determine (i) if appropriate anxiety related cognitions could be elicited from a series of patients with generalised anxiety, (ii) if the reported frequency of such thoughts could be modified by a thought-stopping technique, and (iii) if any changes in thought frequency were associated with improvements in mood.

Clearly there are many ‘non-specific’ features involved in thought-stopping which could also have therapeutic effects on mood. For this reason it was necessary to include an alternative procedure, not directed at reducing thought frequency, but having the same degree of plausibility to patients, and preferably to therapists. The control procedure chosen for this purpose was modelled on desensitisation, in which patients were encouraged to allow the supposedly anxiety-provoking thoughts into their mind and tolerate them, rather than attempt to stop them. In summary, the study employed a relaxation training phase as a base-line, followed by a cross-over design in which the two treatment phases of thought-stopping and ‘cognitive desensitisation’ were given to each patient, in balanced order.     

Differential predictability of females and males

This study examined the existence of sex differences in validity coefficients from a variety of different types of tests. It was found that female validities significantly exceeded male validities by .04 correlational units. When the validities were broken down by predictor categories, no significant differences were observed between males and females on either personality or high school background measures; and female validities exceeded male validities on tests of abstract reasoning, clerical abilities, information, mathematical abilities, verbal abilities, and composite scores from multiple tests. Implications of these findings are discussed.Use of the Michigan State University computing facilities was made possible through support, in part, from the National Science Foundation.